Wat tonen bodycams? En wat tonen ze niet?

What we see in police video footage tends to be shaped by what we already believe. “Our interpretation of video is just as subject to cognitive biases as our interpretation of things we see live,” Professor Stoughton said. “People disagree about policing and will continue to disagree about exactly what a video shows.”

As such videos become more commonly used in court to either bolster or dispute the accounts of police officers, people must be careful how they interpret the footage, keeping in mind the cameras’ limits and viewers’ biases. “People are expecting more of body cameras than the technology will deliver,” Professor Stoughton said. “They expect it to be a broad solution for the problem of police-community relations, when in fact it’s just a tool, and like any tool, there’s a limited value to what it can do.”